Decolonising the BBC Radio Archive: Challenges, Opportunities, Ethics of Care and Access

Focusing on the project Whose Voice? Whose Story? BBC radio news and the language of race in post-WWII Britain, this article explores the opportunities and challenges of working with a digitised archive of radio news scripts for Home Service/Radio Four. The project’s aims have been to explore the language used to report on the Black-British experience in BBC radio news; to produce podcasts whereby different generations of the public from African and Caribbean backgrounds speak back to the BBC’s reporting; to create an online resource that offers a collaborative approach to engaging a wider public with broadcast archives. We have applied decolonising methodologies, using concepts such as the ‘living archive’, ‘clapping back’ and ‘design justice’, to research, interpret and make this archive widely available. However, our work has been met with challenges, namely the BBC’s institutional silence and inertia; lack of funding within academia, and its reliance on outdated technologies.

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